Tag: Grinnell College

Welcome back after our Thanksgiving break. We hope your holiday was not ruined by college application hysteria. With about a month to go until many application deadlines hit, we would like to take up a practical topic that might affect how many applications your teenager is thinking about submitting in a few weeks. That topic is application fees.

1. The Cost

For some of you, the cost of submitting an application–which is likely to be somewhere between $35 and $75 per application–is not a big deal. Even if your teenager applies to 10 or 15 schools with fees on the higher side, that cost of perhaps $1,000 is not critical in your financial picture.

However, for many families, coming up with even $500 is a significant issue. A lot is written in the education press about the notion that application fees, even reasonable ones, do actually keep some kids from applying to college–especially lower-income kids and first-generation college-goers. All of us interested in improving the educational lives of our nation’s kids should view that as a problem.

2. The Process

We wholeheartedly agree with the Foundation. Clearly, some families are intimidated by the prospect of figuring out how to get a waiver for those application fees, even though this is one thing that most high school guidance counselors are well equipped to handle. And there are several routes to those waivers.

The Common App makes it relatively easy. In completing the Common App, your teenager will be asked to declare whether and why he or she is eligible for a fee waiver. The question offers all of the choices for confirming eligibility: receiving an ACT/SAT testing fee waiver, getting free or reduced-price lunch at school, meeting family income eligibility guidelines, being enrolled in a government program that aids students from low-income families, receiving public assistance, being homeless or living in a foster home, being a ward of the state or an orphan, or being able to supply a statement from a local school or community official.

In most cases, at some point, your teenager’s guidance counselor will be asked to verify eligibility for the waiver. So, it is important to stay in contact with the guidance counselor to make sure that the guidance counselor knows that your teenager has applied for the waivers and that process is working. I think it is fair to say that, just as technology has made it easier to apply to colleges, it has also made it easier to get and use application fee waivers. But that doesn’t mean that some families won’t still be intimidated and/or confused by the process, especially if parents are not native English speakers.

3. Interesting Cases

Let’s look at a few cases of colleges that have recently dropped the application fee. Starting this year, Bowdoin College (Brunswick, ME), an excellent small liberal arts college, will automatically waive the $65 application fee “for students applying for financial aid and first-generation-to-college students (neither parent graduated from a four-year college or university),” according to its website. Trinity College (Hartford, CT), another great small liberal arts college, has eliminated its $65 application fee for first-generation college students.

While it is undoubtedly helpful that colleges are making accommodations for families who need them, it was surprising to me to learn just how many colleges–including top-ranked colleges–do not have any application fees at all. For example, Reed College (Portland, OR) eliminated its $50 fee. Its website explains the decision this way:

‘It’s a small but meaningful step,’ said Crystal Williams, Dean for Institutional Diversity. ‘We want Reed to be a more inclusive community and cutting the admission fee levels the playing field at the earliest stage of the game and allows prospective students a chance to explore all their opportunities.’ (quoted from the website)

Here is a short list of great colleges with no fee, in addition to our excellent military academies (you can find them all just by Googling “colleges without application fees,” just as I did):

There are many, many more. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t have been more surprised. We should note, by the way, that some colleges charge a fee for a paper application, even when they do not charge a fee for an online application, like the Common App.

New York City public school students from low-income families will no longer have to pay a fee to apply to the City University of New York, . . . part of an effort to encourage more young people to go to college.

Under the initiative, all high school students who meet one of a handful of criteria will be able to apply to CUNY free. The city estimated that the change will affect 37,500 students, up from about 6,500 students in recent years. More than half of the city’s public school students who enroll in college attend CUNY schools.

The application fee is $65 per student, but Mayor Bill de Blasio said that while the amount can seem trivial to some, for many families it is not. And for students who are not sure about applying to college, it is one more hurdle standing in the way of their continued education. . . .

In the past, CUNY granted fee waivers to students with the greatest need, according to the city’s Education Department. Now, any student who qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch, who is homeless or in foster care, or whose family lives in federally subsidized public housing or receives public assistance will automatically be given a waiver. Undocumented students in those categories will also be eligible.

The city’s schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, said students would not need to apply to skip the fee, so this requires no extra step. (quoted from the article)

I think this is a great move by CUNY, but let me go one step more. Why should any student have to pay an application fee to a public university in his or her own home state? It seems to me that no application fee should be one of the perks of public higher education–if not for all students, then at least for students in that state. If an application fee is an obstacle to students–as many have said it is–then shouldn’t that obstacle be removed in public higher education? Maybe then we would have more students from low-income families and even middle-income families applying to the great public flagship university in their own state or to the public universities in states that are lucky enough to have more than one.

4. A Final Thought

While application fee waivers can help solve the problem of getting more lower-income students to apply to college and even to apply to more colleges so that they can have a wider selection of colleges to choose from next spring, what about kids from middle-income families and even upper-income families who do not qualify for the waivers? I think we have said this before, but it bears repeating right now: Limiting the number of colleges your teenager can apply to because of the cost of making the applications could be penny wise and pound foolish.

We continue to believe that it is important for kids to have as many options as possible once those acceptance letters come in. If a couple of hundred dollars now means that your teenager is looking at more options next April, then we think it is worth it. We don’t say that lightly, but we know that giving teenagers their best chance to choose a college from among a handful of acceptances can be priceless and can be a sound investment for many years to come. So, it’s still not too late to add a few colleges to the list–especially if you have not maxed out your Common App slots!

The Kindle ebook version of our book, How To Find the Right College, is on sale for $0.99 through 2016! Read it on your Kindle device or download the free Kindle app for any tablet or smartphone. The book is also available as a paperback workbook.

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1. Your Assignment #7

For Assignment #7, your teenager and you are going to look at whether the college has a “core curriculum”–or what might be called “general education” credits or requirements or what we called “distribution requirements” in the old days.

2. What Is a Core Curriculum?

For the purpose of this episode, we will refer to this likely centuries-old curriculum concept as a “core curriculum.” What it means is that all students in a college, or in a specific college or school within a larger university, have to take typically one or two courses in each of a broad range of academic disciplines, such as mathematics, or in each of a broad range of groups of disciplines, such as natural sciences, languages and literature, social sciences, and so on. Each college seems to have its own unique way of defining these groups of disciplines, with some more understandable than others.

Some colleges have quite strict requirements, meaning usually that there are many different requirements that have to be met and that might amount to a double handful of courses before it’s all over. Some colleges have a core curriculum, but have far fewer requirements for the courses or number of courses that have to be taken. And some colleges have no core curriculum at all. Would the presence of core curriculum requirements make a difference to your teenager in choosing a college?

3. What Is the Purpose of a Core Curriculum?

So, what is the purpose of a core curriculum? The concept comes from the liberal arts tradition, where students are supposed to be well rounded in their studies and in their understanding of the intellectual content and issues of many fields. People in favor of this tradition would say that students do not know exactly where their careers and lives will take them and that the ability to solve problems and think critically across a range of content could make the difference in how well they succeed in their careers (likely in their multiple careers) and indeed in their lives. It is no surprise that liberal arts colleges and that the arts and sciences college or school within large universities would support and require a core curriculum for its students.

Engineering has been called the newest liberal art. At Columbia Engineering, students not only study science and mathematics and gain technical skills but also study literature, philosophy, art history, music theory, and major civilizations through the Core Curriculum in the humanities.

Students are encouraged to consider the wide range of possibilities open to them, both academically and professionally. To this end, the first and second years of the four-year undergraduate program comprise approximately 66 semester points of credit that expose students to a cross-fertilization of ideas from different disciplines within the University. The sequence of study proceeds from an engagement with engineering and scientific fundamentals, along with humanities and social sciences, toward an increasingly focused training in the third and fourth years designed to give students mastery of certain principles and arts central to engineering and applied science. (quoted from the website)

So, at Fu, students are required to take some liberal arts courses early on in their engineering program in order to provide some humanities balance to the heavy load of mathematics and sciences that all engineering students take. The brilliance of this position comes in the notion that students who find that engineering is not what they had expected–for whatever reason–are well equipped to transfer to another field of study and move many of these core credits with them. For some engineering students, these liberal arts courses could be a drag; for other engineering students, they could turn out to save the day.

One important advantage of a core curriculum is that it causes students to look into whole academic fields that are rarely taught in high schools?like anthropology or sociology or art history or linguistics. Without requirements in a variety of academic fields or groups of fields, many students would never take a look at some of them and would never know what they had missed.

As it turns out, some colleges go one step further and require certain courses of all students?the actual courses, not just the academic fields. So, instead of saying to students that they must take two courses in the languages and literature, for example, the college will specify that all students must take Writing 101 and Public Speaking 101. In those cases, the college has decided to require those specific courses that its professors feel are most fundamental to developing the foundation for more advanced college study and to developing a broad understanding of and ability to engage in the modern world. Because all students have taken these same required core courses, professors can use that shared knowledge to help students make connections across subject fields every year from then on.

4. Examples of a Core Curriculum

When we did our nationwide virtual tour of colleges back in Episodes 27 through 54, we often talked about the core curriculum requirements of a college. We did that for two reasons. First, we were super-impressed with some of them, even though we could tell that they would be quite demanding of students. Second, we knew that some students would love the idea of a core curriculum, while other students would hate the idea of a core curriculum. There are two groups of students who are likely to hate the idea the most. One group is students who do not feel confident in a range of academic fields (this often comes in the form of “I’d like to go to a college where I don’t have to take advanced science or math”). The other group is students who are anxious to get on with what exactly they already know they want to study and don’t want to waste time with other things (this often comes in the form of “I want to be a computer scientist, and I don’t see a need for these humanities requirements”).

Nonetheless, here are a handful of examples of some of the core curricula we talked about during our nationwide virtual tour of colleges:

Let’s start with a tiny Catholic college with a student enrollment of fewer than 200 undergraduates: Wyoming Catholic College, located in Lander and the only four-year private college in the state of Wyoming. According to its website, this faith-based college offers a classical liberal arts curriculum, which includes a study of the Great Books of Western culture and a serious set of distribution requirements, which includes 24 credits of theology, 13 credits of leadership, 10 credits of philosophy, and 16 credits of Latin. Interestingly, students graduate with a B.A. in Liberal Arts?not in a specific subject field.

Grinnell College in the “rolling farmland” of central Iowa offers a unique Individually Advised Curriculum, described this way on the website:

Every first-year student at Grinnell enrolls in the First-Year Tutorial, a small group of students [limited to 12] working with a faculty member to study a subject of interest to both students and tutor. The tutor also is the academic adviser for each student in the group, so that teaching and learning are closely linked with the planning of programs of study. In teaching, the tutor discovers the aptitudes and interests of the students, who in turn receive academic advice, not from an infrequently consulted stranger, but from a teacher who sees them several times each week. In planning a program of study, the student and the tutor balance the cultivation of existing interests with the discovery of new ones. An entering student should regard the first year as a time for gaining breadth in the arts and sciences, confidence in exploring a variety of disciplines, and a more mature understanding of the place of each of these in liberal education as a whole. (quoted from the website)

Grinnell does expect students to become proficient in written English by taking at least one appropriate course, to develop knowledge of mathematics and/or a foreign language, and to take courses in these three areas: humanities, science, and social studies. So, there are some distribution requirements, but extreme freedom in what exactly to take. When a student finally chooses a major, his or her academic advisor will be assigned from that subject field.

Let’s turn to St. John’s College, which has two campuses, with students often transferring for a year between the two: St. John’s Annapolis in Maryland and St. John’s Santa Fe in New Mexico. But the real unique idea at St. John’s is its liberal arts curriculum, based on collaborative inquiry in small class discussions, with the professor acting as a tutor and mentor?all based on the original texts of great authors in almost every subject field. The Seminar, as St. John’s calls it, is the foundation for the curriculum, and it is described this way on the website:

Students participate in far-reaching and free but disciplined conversations about major works of literature, philosophy, political theory, theology, history, economics, and psychology from Homer and the Greek historians, playwrights, and philosophers in the freshman year, through the Renaissance in the sophomore year and the Enlightenment in the junior year, to the contemporary world in the senior year. (quoted from the website)

Students at St. John’s are also required to take four years of mathematics, three years of laboratory science, two years of music (including singing in the Freshman Chorus together), and four years of a second language (two years of Ancient Greek and two years of modern French). Clearly, this is one serious set of core curriculum requirements.

Let’s move on to Middlebury College in Vermont, perhaps best known for its excellent language programs for a hundred years. In the classic liberal arts tradition, Middlebury students must fulfill two sets of distribution requirements: (1) one course in seven of eight academic fields (including foreign language); and (2) one course in each of four cultures and civilizations areas:

a. Courses that focus on some aspect of the cultures and civilizations of Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and the Caribbean

Courses that focus on the process of comparison between and among cultures and civilizations, or courses that focus on the identity and experience of separable groups within cultures and civilizations

Courses that focus on some aspect of European cultures and civilizations

Courses that focus on some aspect of the cultures and civilizations of northern America (United States and Canada) (quoted from the website)

Georgetown University, the oldest Catholic and Jesuit university in the U.S., offers its undergraduates the opportunity to study in the schools of foreign service, business, or nursing and health studies or in Georgetown College, the liberal arts college that first established the institution. Before pursuing one of more than 40 majors, students in the College must complete core requirements in a wide range of humanities and science fields, including two courses in theology, starting with either The Problem of God or Introduction to Biblical Literature as freshmen.

Colgate University, a small liberal arts university in upstate New York, has undergraduates studying in 54 majors, which come from a strong and broad liberal arts Core Curriculum. Students are required to take four courses in their first two years: Legacies of the Ancient World, Challenges of Modernity, Communities and Identities, and Scientific Perspectives on the World. Students are also required to take one course with a Global Engagements designation and six more courses from three liberal arts and sciences areas.

Undergraduate students at Morehouse College, the all-men HBCU in Atlanta, are required to complete a core curriculum, which includes four courses in the humanities?one in religion, one in philosophy, one in art history, and one in music history. That is about as liberal arts as it gets.

But it’s not just small private colleges that have a core curriculum. The huge flagship University of Texas at Austin puts all of its freshmen into the School of Undergraduate Studies, where they explore their interests through a liberal-arts-and-sciences core curriculum of 42 credits. In their freshman year, students take UT’s Signature Course, which is actually an array of 150 course offerings for students to choose from, all of which provide college-level experiences in thinking and writing and speaking and research. Students are encouraged to go outside their comfort zone when choosing from the Signature Courses, which are often interdisciplinary, like Astronomy and the Humanities. UT students leave the School of Undergraduate Studies by the end of their second year to pursue their major course of study.

At Penn State, typical undergraduates take almost one-third of their courses in the College of Liberal Arts. All students are required to take 45 credits of General Education courses, including three credits of writing-intensive coursework, a course in U.S. cultures, a course in international cultures, and coursework that covers social and behavioral sciences, humanities, natural sciences, quantitative skills, the arts, and health and physical activity.

It is hard to do this episode without a nod to our own two undergraduate alma maters, so let’s look at them. Here are the “distribution requirements” and the “breadth requirements” in Cornell University‘s College of Arts and Sciences curriculum (and these are in addition to two first-year writing seminars, a serious intermediate-level foreign language requirement–which many high-ranked colleges have, two physical education courses plus a swimming test):

2 courses in physical and biological sciences

1 course in mathematics and quantitative reasoning

1 course that is in either sciences or mathematics

Five arts and sciences courses from at least 4 of the following social sciences, humanities, and arts categories:

Cultural analysis

Historical analysis

Knowledge, cognition, and moral reasoning

Literature and the arts

Social and behavioral analysis

Geographic breadth requirement: 1 course that focuses on an area or a people other than those of the United States, Canada, or Europe

Historic breadth requirement: 1 course that focuses on an historic period before the 20th century

While I would applaud these requirements for my own children and for the children of all of my friends, I can tell you that the requirements were not quite so demanding in the early 1970s. And, for that, I believe I am grateful.

So, let’s take a look at Barnard College‘s brand new curriculum, called Foundations, which I know you didn’t have, Marie, because it applies for the first time to students entering this fall. Barnard has what it calls “distributional requirements” and “modes of thinking” (in addition to a first-year writing course, first-year seminar, and one physical education course):

2 courses in the languages

2 courses in the arts/humanities

2 courses in the social sciences

2 courses in the sciences (1 with a lab)

1 course in thinking locally–New York City

1 course in thinking through global inquiry

1 course in thinking about social difference

1 course in thinking with historical perspective

1 course in thinking quantitatively and empirically

1 course in thinking technologically and digitally

I would have to say that those requirements are also quite demanding, especially for a student who, right or wrong, is not interested in broadening her horizons.

So, if all this is just too much, take a look at just a few colleges that do not have a standard core curriculum of courses:

Let’s start with The Evergreen State College, a public liberal arts college in Washington’s capital city of Olympia. Students at Evergreen take one interdisciplinary course, called a program, at a time, which might last one, two, or even three quarters. Built around a theme, a program integrates several subjects and is taught by a team of two to four professors from different subject fields. Students participate in a mixture of lectures, seminars, tutorials, field trips, labs, and the like during each program. There are no required programs and no distribution requirements and no major requirements (because there are no majors) for earning a Bachelor of Arts degree. A Bachelor of Science or a Bachelor of Arts and Science does have some math, science, or computer science requirements.

At Hamilton College in upstate New York, students pursue studies in 51 fields, based on a broad liberal arts and sciences curriculum that each student works out with his or her advisor. There are a few requirements?such as at least three writing-intensive courses?but there seems to be quite a bit of freedom in operationalizing the spirit of a liberal arts education.

Pitzer College, one of the five undergraduate colleges in The Claremont Colleges consortium in California, offers its 1,000 students about 40 fields of study in an “interdisciplinary liberal arts education emphasizing social justice, intercultural understanding and environmental sensitivity” (quoted from the website). Students are expected to engage in community service and are given the freedom to create their own academic programs; there are no traditional core course requirements.

So, have your teenager take the Assignment #7 worksheet and complete one for each college on his or her long summer list of college options, and I hope it is still long. First, note whether there is a core curriculum, or general education course, or distribution requirements, or breadth requirements, or whatever that college might call the list of academic fields or groups of fields or even specific courses all students must take. Remember, if it is a university, make sure that your teenager checks the college or school of interest to him or her; requirements may well not be the same for all of the colleges and schools in the university. Second, write down exactly what the requirements are. When the time comes to decide which colleges stay on the list, the number and rigor and breadth of the requirements might be something you all will want to consider.

The Kindle ebook version of our book, How To Find the Right College, is on sale for $1.99 all summer long! Read it on your Kindle device or download the free Kindle app for any tablet or smartphone. The book is also available as a paperback workbook.

Ask your questions or share your feedback by..

Leaving a comment below on the show notes for this episode

Calling us at (516) 900-6922 to record a question on our USACollegeChat voicemail if you want us to answer your question live on our podcast

In last week’s episode, we continued our virtual tour of colleges by looking at the seven states of the Plains region: Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota. We talked about public universities—both the flagship state public universities and other public universities in those states. Today, we will continue our tour of the Plains states by focusing on private higher education institutions.

We are going to check out a couple of national—well, really, international universities—as well as a handful of small liberal arts colleges.

As we say in every one of these episodes, we want to make it clear that no college has asked us or paid us anything to name it. These are entirely our own choices.

And to repeat: Because enrollment figures are not necessarily comparable as reported by various colleges, you should use the figures we provide here just as an approximation of the actual campus enrollment, but one that is good enough to help you understand whether the student body is the right size for your child—roughly, small, medium, or large.

1. Private Universities

Let’s start with a university that ranks in the very top tier of almost everyone’s list: Washington University in St. Louis (known fondly as WashU). Yes, it is in St. Louis, Missouri—no connection to the state of Washington or to Washington, D.C. With about 6,500 undergraduates, 6,500 graduate and professional students, and another 1,000 nontraditional evening and weekend students, WashU describes itself as a medium-sized university. I mention the nontraditional evening and weekend enrollment because, interestingly enough, WashU was founded in 1853 as an evening program especially designed for the many newcomers who had been flooding the relatively new state and who needed industrial training and basic education courses. Its students are drawn from 50 states and more than 100 foreign countries, with only about 10 percent coming from Missouri; it is indeed an international university. While I believe that an undergraduate student body of 6,500 will still feel rather large to an incoming freshman, WashU claims to have a student-to-faculty ratio of an astoundingly low 8:1. I believe that is the lowest I have seen, including from small liberal arts colleges, and I imagine that is one thing that helps freshmen feel engaged quickly.

Situated on a hilltop, the campus was laid out in 1895 by Frederick Law Olmsted, landscape architect extraordinaire, who also happened to design two little parks we have in New York City—Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Despite this beautiful setting, 40 percent of WashU students still study abroad.

WashU offers undergraduates a choice of about 90 fields of study, spread out over colleges/schools of arts and sciences, business, engineering, art, and architecture. It also has graduate schools of law, medicine, arts and sciences, and social work and public heath. Like all medium-sized and large universities we have seen, WashU fields a lot of varsity sports teams—nine men’s and 10 women’s teams, to be exact— and offers 37 club sports. A surprisingly high 75 percent of students participate in single-sex and coeducational intramural sports. And, with about 370 student organizations, WashU students can be kept quite busy.

Let us just note that the tuition at WashU is a staggeringly high $47,000 per year, but that is unfortunately in keeping with the best private universities in the U.S. While the WashU website indicates that the University will work with families to make satisfactory financial arrangements and while children of lower-income families are awarded grants that do not have to be repaid, let’s admit that the tuition sounds like a lot of money.

Without leaving Missouri, let’s look at a Catholic university of about the same size as WashU, and that is Saint Louis University, in St. Louis. It is a Jesuit university founded in 1818—the first university west of the Mississippi River. It is one of 28 Jesuit universities in the U.S. We spoke about Jesuit institutions in an early episode of NYCollegeChat; as we said then, they have excellent academic reputations and include colleges like Georgetown University, Boston College, Fordham University, and the College of the Holy Cross. The Jesuit vision of education is a student who excels academically, serves others, and seeks social justice relentlessly. Saint Louis University prides itself on educating the whole person—“mind, body, heart and spirit” (quoted from the website). As evidence of the Jesuit commitment to serving others, Saint Louis students, faculty, and staff contribute one million volunteer service hours each year, and service learning is integrated into quite a few academic courses.

Saint Louis offers about 100 undergraduate majors across undergraduate schools/colleges of arts and sciences, public health and social justice, business, education and public service, health sciences, nursing, social work, and engineering, aviation, and technology. It also offers undergraduate training leading to the priesthood and graduate schools of law and medicine, among other fields. Like other universities, it offers varsity sports teams— seven men’s and nine women’s teams—and more than 150 student organizations, plus fraternities and sororities. Its price tag is hefty at about $39,000 in tuition per year, but the website claims that 97 percent of first-time freshmen get financial aid.

One super-attractive feature of Saint Louis University is its own campus in Madrid, which serves about 675 undergraduate and graduate students. Just half are from the U.S. Opened in 1967 and recently renovated, undergraduates can study in 11 business and liberal arts degree fields. Courses are taught in English, with some selected courses taught in Spanish. Saint Louis undergraduates can study in Madrid for a semester or for their entire four years, depending on their majors.

2. Private Liberal Arts Colleges

Let’s start with two small liberal arts colleges in Minnesota: Carleton College and Macalester College. Carleton is located in Northfield, about 40 miles south of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, home to the University of Minnesota and other colleges. Founded in 1866 by the General Conference of Congregational Churches, it has no religious affiliation today.

Carleton is a classic liberal arts college (that is, undergraduate education only), offering 37 majors in the arts and sciences and 15 mostly interdisciplinary concentrations. It enrolls about 2,000 students, drawn nationally and internationally. While more students come from Minnesota than any other state, with California not far behind, both New York and Illinois send about half the number of those leading states to Carleton. Entering freshmen have very high SAT and ACT scores, and about 75 percent of them graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school classes. About 25 percent identify as “people of color.”

Freshmen are required to live on campus, and about 90 percent stay on campus, contributing to the close-knit community feel and an unusually close engagement with professors, both in and out of classes. The student-to-faculty ratio is an unusually low 9:1, meaning that professors spend a lot of time getting to know students. About 98 percent of Carleton seniors say that they were happy with the quality of instruction in their classes. The four-year graduation rate is an enviably high 90 percent (the national average is about 38 percent). Furthermore, over 80 percent of Carleton graduates go on to graduate or professional school within 10 years.

Carleton operates on a trimester schedule of three 10-week terms, with students taking three courses at a time, rather than the typical four or five. This schedule allows for the in-depth thinking Carleton prides itself on having students do in their courses. More than 70 percent of students study abroad during their four years.

Though much smaller than the private and public universities we have been looking at, Carleton still fields nine men’s and nine women’s varsity sports teams and offers more than 50 student-organized club sports and intramurals. About 90 percent of all Carleton students participate in some sport at some level. Carleton’s Cowling Arboretum, which provides trails for walkers, runners, bicyclists, and cross-country skiers, was named one of the top 10 places to run by Runner’s World magazine. Carleton also has 250 student organizations.

You can imagine that all this comes at a price, and that price is $48,000 in tuition each year. Carleton does say that it is “committed to meeting 100 percent of financial aid for all admitted students, all four years” (quoted from the website). Interestingly, about 80 percent of students have jobs on campus.

Macalester College is similar to Carleton in many ways. Both colleges are on many lists of the top 25 liberal arts colleges in the U.S., with Carleton usually ranking in the top 10. Macalester is located in a residential area of St. Paul, so its students can take advantage of everything the Twin Cities have to offer. Founded in 1874 by Rev. Edward Neill, it is Presbyterian affiliated, but nonsectarian. Neill was a missionary to the Minnesota territory, who later served as the first president of the University of Minnesota. But he was concerned about educating future leaders and believed that the best way to do that was in a small private college. And so Macalester was born, with a donation from a Philadelphia philanthropist.

Like Carleton, Macalester is a classic liberal arts college, offering 38 majors in the arts and sciences. It also enrolls just over 2,000 students, drawn nationally and internationally. Similar to Carleton, about 70 percent of incoming freshmen graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school classes. Like Carleton, about 25 percent of students identify as students of color.

The student-to-faculty ratio is also low at 10:1, meaning that students have a chance to get to know their professors well. Similar to Carleton, the four-year graduation rate is an enviably high 85 percent, and about 65 percent of Macalester graduates go on to graduate or professional school within five years.

About 60 percent of Macalester students study abroad during their four years, and about 75 percent have internships. A whopping 95 percent do volunteer work in the Twin Cities at some point, with about half of Macalester students volunteering in any given semester.

Similar to Carleton, Macalester fields nine men’s and 10 women’s varsity sports teams. About half of Macalester students participate in intramural sports. It also has more than 90 student organizations.

Unfortunately, the price is also comparable at about $49,000 in tuition each year. But like Carleton, Macalester says that it will meet 100 percent of demonstrated financial need of admitted students, making Macalester and Carleton two of 70 U.S. colleges that will do that.

A third college that also typically ranks in the top 25 national private liberal arts colleges on all kinds of lists is Grinnell College in Grinnell in the “rolling farmland” of central Iowa. Founded in 1846, Grinnell is another college with Congregational Church roots.

A bit smaller than Carleton and Macalester, Grinnell has an enrollment of about 1,600 students, drawn nationally and internationally, again with about 25 percent students of color.

Grinnell offers 26 arts and sciences majors and 11 interdisciplinary concentrations and also has a very favorable student-to-teacher ratio of 9:1. Here is an explanation of Grinnell’s unique Individually Advised Curriculum:

Every first-year student at Grinnell enrolls in the First-Year Tutorial, a small group of students [limited to 12] working with a faculty member to study a subject of interest to both students and tutor. The tutor also is the academic adviser for each student in the group, so that teaching and learning are closely linked with the planning of programs of study. In teaching, the tutor discovers the aptitudes and interests of the students, who in turn receive academic advice, not from an infrequently consulted stranger, but from a teacher who sees them several times each week. In planning a program of study, the student and the tutor balance the cultivation of existing interests with the discovery of new ones. An entering student should regard the first year as a time for gaining breadth in the arts and sciences, confidence in exploring a variety of disciplines, and a more mature understanding of the place of each of these in liberal education as a whole. (quoted from the website)

Grinnell does expect students to become proficient in written English by taking at least one appropriate course, to develop knowledge of mathematics and/or a foreign language, and to take courses in these three areas: humanities, science, and social studies. So, there are some distribution requirements, but extreme freedom in what exactly to take. When a student finally chooses a major, his or her academic advisor will be assigned from that subject field.

In addition, Grinnell is a strong proponent of independent study for its students—that is, “guided readings, independent projects, mentored summer research, and course-linked projects that add credits to an existing course” (quoted from the website).

Abut 60 percent of Grinnell students spend time studying abroad and, according to the website, “Grinnell is among the leaders in sending graduates to the Peace Corps and supports its own Grinnell Corps — a yearlong postgraduate service opportunity in Asia, Africa, and North America — underscoring the College’s strong commitment to social responsibility and action.”

Grinnell offers more than 200 student organizations and nine men’s and nine women’s varsity sports teams. To help students develop skills of getting along with each other as a community, Grinnell’s residence halls are self-governed by the students.

As with the other small liberal arts college we have looked at, tuition at Grinnell is a high $45,000 per year.

3. Colleges That Change Lives

As we have said in several earlier episodes, Colleges That Change Lives is a nonprofit organization that was founded after the publication of the book Colleges That Change Lives, by Loren Pope, a retired New York Times education editor. There are now 44 colleges and universities profiled in the book and on the organization’s website. Those that are included are not necessarily famous institutions. Most are smaller colleges and universities that have proved to be successful at developing students both personally and academically so that they can succeed in life after their undergraduate college years.

Two of the 44 institutions profiled are located in the Plains states. You should read about them in the book or on the website to learn more about both of them. They are St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota (also the home of Carleton College), with about 3,000 students; and Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, with just about 1,100 students. Interestingly, Cornell College (not to be confused with Cornell University in Ithaca, New York) uses the same fascinating one-at-a-time course schedule that Colorado College uses, as we discussed in Episode 34.

Because these Colleges That Change Lives institutions are relatively small and thus are not particularly well known outside of their geographic region, it is my feeling that out-of-state students with a decent high school record might have a good chance of being accepted.

Listen to the podcast to find out about…

How to make study abroad easy

Why student-to-teacher ratio might matter

What “100 percent of demonstrated financial need” really means

Check out these higher education institutions and organizations we mention…